The Heathen Visibility Project has a serious purpose (see previous posts) but it's fun to participate. I take photos and am also in some photos. Many others create Project images.

All Heathen Visibility Project photos are available free to use for any newspaper, news station, magazine, reporter, journalist, media illustrator, blogger, etc. to use for editorial purposes to illustrate articles about Asatru, Heathen religion, and related topics. These images are free Creative Commons license images, free to use for non-commercial uses, attribution preferred.

Yule is one of the main holidays we celebrate in Asatru. Yuletide is the winter solstice, but also can refer to the 12 Days of Yule or to the entire month of December and sometimes the whole holiday season on into January. The varying times and dates are mostly for historical reasons involving calendars, math, translation, and astronomy. American Heathens and Asatruers* often celebrate, decorate, feast, and otherwise observe Yule much the way the secular version of winter holidays are done in the USA. This year I had more lights outdoors, thanks to the corner neighbor, who has really set the standard for my street on holiday decorating since moving in a couple of years ago. Most of my indoor Yule decorations are family decor from my mom, who was an atheist, and my grandmother, who was a Christian, or pieces I made, although now I also have a few things inherited from my late companion Tom.

This photoshoot started because my friend Jim Connor, who used to be a concert photographer, is getting back into a photography and wanted to practice. Jim is the same photographer who did the photoshoot for the back cover of my book Asatru: A Beginner's Guide to the Heathen Path.

I'm not exactly the world's prettiest model, having a body shaped from puberty by PCOS and even more by the awful treatments for it, a variety of issues that made it difficult to exercise, and now also by Hashimoto's Disease. But I'm what I've got, so here I am.

 *Asatruers is a regularized Modern English spelling of Icelandic Asatruar which is plural.

Image:

Erin Lale in her Asatru religious attire at the Yule holiday. Photo by Jim Connor. This image is a Heathen Visibility Project image and is free to use for editorial purposes.